Eight years ago, shortly after we closed on the Colorado cabin, we made plans with six friends to drive up from Texas and camp out on our new property.

I enjoy throwing parties, but I never want them to be too formal, so a rustic cabin in the woods seemed like the perfect setting. I also thought camping parties might be the solution to my ambivalence about overnight guests: I love them in the evening, when we’re wrapping up a long, conversation-fueled dinner. In the morning, I do not want to see them.

(Naturally, the main character in my murder mystery Up to Her Neck is restoring an old hot-springs resort.)

I’d rather friends who come to visit stay at a hotel, but I think I hide it well. Their bedroom will look like a spread from Grand American Hotels (or Cabin Porn, at least) and the kitchen will be stocked with local goodies, like Bird & Mouse English muffins, or Deerhammer’s bourbon.

I come from people who wouldn’t think of flying 900 miles if they have a car, and will happily sleep in that corner of your office that hasn’t been vacuumed since the pandemic ended, but I believe in the magic of great hospitality. I believe being a good hostess is as high a calling as medicine or religion.

Deep inside, though, I am a person who doesn’t want to make coffee for you. I need time after I wake up in the morning, to remember who I am, what I’m doing here, and why. I don’t make coffee for anyone, except my husband because he happens to be there and the Bialetti Moka pot I use at the cabin brews two perfect cups.

That’s why the few houseguests I do enjoy having without any caveats (you know who you are) are also experienced campers. They already have their morning routine figured out, without assistance.

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I was studying Italian on the Pimsleur app at the time of this adventure, walking around the house repeating, “No, you must not do the laundry. Not the sheets, not the blanket, nor the towels,” while I packed compostable toilet paper and dry goods.

Why must you not do these things? “Perché sei mio ospite.” Because you are my guest.

Off-grid at 10,000 feet, though? Hospitality falls into a gray area. We always have extra backpacks, hats, and sunscreen on hand. But when there isn’t a flushing toilet, much less a washing machine, you must bring your own sleeping bag, you must bring ice. You must bring coffee, because running out of coffee at the cabin is like running out of water. Worse, actually, because we have a filter that makes drinking water.

We’d planned the guest list accordingly. One couple had helped us scout the place the previous fall, so they knew what they were getting into. The second couple prefer a funky motel to a faceless hotel chain any day. We knew they’d dig it.

Ned*, our fifth guest, is a natural entertainer with a gift for finding the most interesting people in a 50-mile radius. You might get a text inviting you for dinner because he met some kids with an online cooking show and helped them capture a wild hog to prepare on camera. Ned is how we ended up watching Apocalypse Now Final Cut in David Caruso’s condo, where the entrance to the bedroom contained a larger-than-life portrait of him as Horatio Caine, doing that thing with his sunglasses.

He’s also my husband’s former brother-in-law and our kids’ uncle, so he’s family.

We were expecting five guests, but Ned is infamous for showing up with a stealth plus-one, someone you would never have thought to invite, often because you’ve never met them. The more the merrier is his philosophy, and it’s a beautiful philosophy until you’re struggling to recall the name of the person sobbing on your porch at 4 in the morning, hours after everyone else – including Ned – has left.

He called a couple of weeks before we were scheduled to meet up in the mountains. Michael answered, listened for a moment, tapped the mute button, and looked at me with mild dread.

“No,” I said. “Whatever it is, it’s a bad idea.”

Michael sighed. “He wants to bring Mitch.”

“To Colorado?!”

Mitch is a lovely man, an arts patron, a South Texas style icon, and a diplomat — and usually the last person to leave the dance floor. He was also in his seventies at the time, with the bone density of a barn swallow. He had negative body fat and not much hair, either.

The Claim is at ten-thousand feet, I said. It freezes at night. The cabin is uninhabitable. There would be no hot water. No. Hot. Water. (Except for coffee, of course.)

“I know.” Michael looked miserable. He’d had years of practice at this and it hadn’t gotten any easier. “But how do we say no?”

I suggested he remind him that Mitch lived in an un-airconditioned house in South Texas. “He rides a bike in the summer,” I added. “In a suit. That is the exact and total environmental opposite of this trip.”

“I know, I know.”

But we always cave to Ned. He can be so fun and generous. And he’s family. And he’d asked ahead of time, which was so unusual I went out and bought a lottery ticket later that afternoon. My displeasure over the interminable porch night must have filtered through the grapevine.

A few minutes later, I heard Michael wrapping up. “Make sure you break in your hiking boots beforehand,” he said, “and bring plenty of water.”

“And coffee,” I shouted across the room.

We arrived a few days early and spruced up the outhouses, rebuilt the fire ring, and hung hammocks on the deck. Our friends began arriving and pitching their tents. We set up an old table behind the cabin for the Coleman stove and the water station.

The sun was sinking into the pines at the far end of the canyon when Ned turned into the drive.

“We stopped at Dwight’s place last night,” he announced as they pulled a couple of worrisomely small packs out of the car. Dwight owns a San Antonio restaurant known for its eclectic, Mexico-influenced menu, but his family ranch is in West Texas.

“He wasn’t home,” Mitch added, shivering in the evening chill. “But they had cocktails and a hot casserole waiting for us.”

I decided there was no way this was an implied criticism. Dwight’s ranch had electricity and plumbing. And staff, apparently. We had pine martens and mice. Michael offered to make margaritas while they unpacked. I went to check on dinner.

By the time I returned, Ned had pitched their tent in the middle of the path from the driveway to the cabin.

“Check out Mitch’s bedroll.” He pulled open the flap to reveal Mitch unfurling a bundle of textiles that looked like it had been swiped from Antiques Roadshow. Mitch placed an oval of embroidered felted wool on one half of the floor, and topped it with a Turkish towel and what looked like a Guatemalan huipil.

“You don’t have a sleeping bag?” I asked. “It’s going to be in the twenties tonight.”

He looked at me with pity and said something about cowboys and trail rides.

I stepped away from the tent and expressed my concern to Ned.

“Oh, he’ll be fine,” Ned replied, pulling a copy of How to Change Your Mind, Michael Pollan’s book on psychedelic micro-dosing, out of his pack. “Mitch was roughing it before we were born.”

I started walking away — I wanted a margarita now — and tripped over a box. The lid popped open. Hiking boots, still wrapped in tissue.

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But the first night is always fun. We stayed up talking until the fire burned down to embers.

The following morning, on my way to the outhouse, I spotted a figure in the driveway. He was huddled in a lone ray of sunshine on one of the banged-up red folding chairs the previous owner had left behind. A small woolen cap clung to the silver stubble on his head.

Against my better judgment, I walked over.

“Good morning.” I tried to load my voice with a contagious amount of enthusiasm and warmth.

Mitch was scrunched up so tightly, his eyes were even with his shoulders. I don’t have to tell you what he said.

“Do you have any coffee?”

That’s the hardest part about being a host, isn’t it? Even when you know it’s not your fault that a guest isn’t having a good time, you want to fix it. Well, I didn’t want to. I wanted to stomp over to their tent and kick Ned out of bed. But my chance to duck responsibility had passed the day we said, yes, come to the cabin instead of, “Absolutely not.”

You must not be cold. You must not be un-caffeinated. You must not be miserable. Perché sei mio ospite.

“Of course,” I said. “Give me ten minutes. Let’s start a fire.”

It got worse before it got better. Ned wore such a nasty blister in his heel on the first hike, he spent the rest of the trip sitting cross-legged on the ground, reading his Pollan book. He still has the scar. The red-carpet treatment they’d received at Dwight’s grew more elegiac with each retelling … about 17 times, by my count.

A few days into their stay, I caught Ned and Mitch whispering to some of the other guests by the cooking area. “What is it?” I sighed.

“Mitch was wondering if we could take up a collection to hire a plumber.”

It was not lost on me in this moment, that Dame Agatha offed quite a few hosts as well, but I wanted to yell, Has anyone been paying attention? Even if we could get a plumber to bounce his van up the Worst Road in North America on short notice, even if the water heater didn’t look like this …

… it was still too cold at night to run water in the pipes.

I suggested we all go into town and tour the distillery.

In the end, it was all right, of course. We hung out at a local festival and sunned ourselves by the creek. I bought a case of Palisade peaches, and Mitch used some of them to make a pie that he baked on the grill. It was delicious, like something they might have served at Dwight’s ranch.

Tell me about your best or worst hosting experience. What’s your favorite mystery or thriller set in a hotel or a houseful of guests?

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I knew I’d found the perfect match for my debut, Up to Her Neck, when I saw Empress Editions “Absolutely Not” ball cap. My MC says it often (although not often enough, or she wouldn’t be in hot water all the time). They also have some extremely cool swag for Heather J. Robertson’s midlife rallying cry, Are You There God? It’s Me, Menopause, like this t-shirt: “I Must. I Must. I Must … Not Slap Anyone Today.”

Absolutely Not cap

Preorder Heather's book

Next time: A partial guide to getting rescued in the wilderness.

*As usual, names changed for plausible deniability.

I do think of it every year, though, when we open the cabin for the summer. There’s so much to be done: unpacking the sheets and blankets, turning on the propane, sweeping the outhouses, clearing the mouse traps, hanging the wasp traps, and restocking the firewood. I don’t mind any of it. They’re chores with a view and a cozy fireplace at the end of the day. Hummingbirds buzz me while I work outside because they remember who fills the feeder.

It’s the long-term projects that get me down. Owning a home reveals what kind of person you are and, as it turns out, I am not a task-oriented individual. (I can hear my siblings howling: No shit.) Michael isn’t, either, outside of business hours. He’ll pick up the phone to call a contractor before he picks up a hammer, no matter how small the job.

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He traces his aversion to home-improvement projects to unpleasant weekends spent doing these things with his father, but I don’t care if it’s nature or nurture. His work is stressful and consuming. Of course he wants to spend his weekends reading in the hammock, not installing new screen in the screen doors.

Our incremental progress over the years has been easily outrun by Mother Nature, that great undoer of all human effort. Yes, the patio is in, but the rock retaining wall above it is crumbling. We won’t turn on the water for a couple of weeks (it’s still freezing overnight), but I bet when we do, Michael will be picking up the phone to call the plumber. We need to order more gravel for the yard to maintain our fire perimeter. (Those plants bursting through the rocks in every shade of green? They’re the same varieties I can’t get to grow in my mulched and watered beds in town.)

Each spring, the eroding foundation skirt and the peeling paint remind me that we are only here for a short time: at the cabin, on this planet. It’s both comforting and disheartening to stumble across evidence of the previous owners’ ambitions. A large, rusted metal tank is half-buried just up the hill, remnant of a spring-water delivery system. Below the road, another beautiful rock wall is collapsing onto the floor of a former sawmill.

How long did each of those great works last? I could deep-clean and repaint the outhouses, fix the skylights and rehang the mirrors, and a packrat will move in the minute she thinks we are gone for the season. When we bought the place from Mark, it was almost beyond fixer-upper, and despite the beautiful setting, it carried an air of abandonment, almost sadness. Walter, the man who built the cabins, was a DIY genius. Mark was a duct-tape handyman.

Is it the place? I wonder this in low moments. No, it’s because Emily’s husband spent his weekend on a ladder at their old mining cabin, while we spent ours hiking to the Three Apostles.

The problem is that I freight the whole thing up with ideas like legacy and stewardship. What am I leaving for the next caretaker of this spot? I get misty-eyed whenever I hear Elton John sing, “He must have been a gardener who cared a lot.” I do care a lot, episodically, and when you’re up against mice, sub-zero winter temps, and wood-eating ants, that’s not enough.

Who am I measuring my (lack of) performance against? This Old House? Chip and Joanna Gaines (who went full Aspen aspirational in their cabin redo)? Online influencers? I know better than that last one, at least. Depending on the specific location and lighting, I can make my place look like it belongs in Architectural Digest, or an episode of American Pickers.

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I said I was going to refinish the cast-iron kitchen stove this year, and actually bake something in it. Am I, though? Summer is so short at ten-thousand feet, and I think I’ve got a couple more years before the stool* holding the big casement windows in place fully disintegrates and they fall out the back of the cabin. I’m leaving a lot of meat on the bone for the next owner, that’s how I’ve decided to think of it. Now, where are my maps?

*Apparently that’s what that little ledge is called.

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The male Burden

I keep thinking that if the genders were swapped in Strangers, Belle Burden’s memoir about the end of her marriage and the financial stress that ensued, the people painting Burden’s ex-husband as a monster would be cheering him on. If a woman insisted on financial independence in the face of a prenup favoring her wealthy fiancé, then left the marriage when she felt unfulfilled, she would be a feminist heroine.

I’ve known a few women who had to fight to keep much of anything after decades of marriage because of prenup terms that split post-wedding earnings (largely spent on living) while the trust-fund husband left wealthier than before. What if these women had insisted on more favorable terms for themselves instead of signing whatever their future spouse’s family lawyers handed them?

There is also a whole field of literature, nonfiction and novels, that encourages women to walk out of just-okay marriages. Surely, when they do there are some shocked husbands left behind. Can women and men be equal if we insist on different rules for us?

I’m not discounting Burden’s pain. I think she has done a brave and worthy thing by talking about the betrayal of the affair, the signs she may have missed, and the financial shocks that followed. But the desire to make “James” nothing but a villain misses the opportunity to talk about modern relationships, parenting, money, and personal fulfillment in a way that benefits all readers, not just women. The book has been inspiring and comforting to friends of mine who’ve gone through difficult divorces and I think it’s relevant to an even broader audience when we don’t buy into to the idea that it’s a zero-sum story.

What do you think?

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Next week: As promised, a guide to choosing your personal safety device, and a lament about “bagging fourteeners.”

Hi, all.

I’m posting this just before we load the car and head back to Colorado. I can’t wait to be among the pines and aspen with my cabin neighbors, although recent text messages indicate a siege mentality is taking hold in our ghost town as summer begins.

When we’re in our right minds, we want visitors to come to the forest. If the mountains are calling, you should answer, that’s our attitude. But this year, hospitality is in short supply. It’s alarmingly dry and all the “Extreme Fire Danger” signs in America won’t stop the weekend warriors from showing up for Memorial Day with lighter fluid and a trunk full of logs.

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Car campers used to be families and middle-aged men bonding over their ATVs. Millennials took to it during the pandemic, and now they show up every year with an NFL-size roster, off-leash mascots, and one car for every 1.5 bodies.

It looks like a lot of work for a sleeping bag with a view of dusty hubcaps: Coolers, chairs, plastic suitcases of water, folding tables, games, stoves, grills, Beats Pills, phones, and the battery packs and chargers to keep it all running. I don’t want to start a fight on the holiday weekend, but could you go a couple of days without the electric toothbrush?

But please bring maps.

Last summer I ran into a young couple dressed for an afternoon at the pool, headed west at 10,500 feet. They appeared to be sharing a single plastic water bottle. “Is the trailhead this way?” the woman asked. About three more miles, I confirmed as I studied her canvas sneakers for any sign of tread.

Great, the guy chirped. They were planning to summit the peak that afternoon. That would add an additional 3.8 miles one way. Uphill, as you probably guessed. There were so many obvious reasons this was a bad idea, but the only objection I managed to stammer was, “We saw a bear up there last week.”

“Oh, cool!” the woman exclaimed, and they skipped merrily on their way.

It’s not as if maps are hard to come by out here. Every place with a cash register sells them. Chambers of Commerce and the Forest Service give them away, but you’re more likely to spot Bigfoot crossing the trail than a hiker studying a map. (Our canyon used to be one of the top spots for yeti sightings in the world, but they’ve declined as traffic has increased).

A couple years ago, my husband and youngest son were fishing four miles up a Jeep track when a pair of harried runners in shorts and tank tops came crashing out of the bushes. They’d scaled a 14,000-foot peak (a fourteener, in the parlance) and taken the wrong trail on the way back down. Their tiny packs contained water, GU, a change of socks … but no map. I’d like to say they were an anomaly, but I’ve encountered at least two people trekking the Continental Divide trail without one.

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I usually carry two maps by different makers* when I head out. I’ve felt truly lost twice, and it’s an experience I do not want to repeat. The first time was in a large park in Iowa, which contrary to what I was taught growing up in Minnesota, is not flat. I wandered hills and dales blanketed in chin-high grass for a couple of hours before a nice local couple helped me find the correct turn.

The second time was after a wedding in a clearing in the woods in Texas (which, contrary to what I was taught growing up in Minnesota, is also not flat). We saw a sign or two on the walk in, so I assumed there’d be signs on the way out. We chatted with other guests as we strolled past several forks in the trail. By the time we were trying to find our cars ninety minutes later, we were disoriented and hangry, and the sun was setting. Some of us were wearing high-heel sandals. I vowed to just send a nice gift next time.

Oh, and I did get a little turned around at the Phoenix Desert Botanical Garden during the holiday lights event, but it was very dark and I’d been drinking hot chocolate spiked with peppermint schnapps. The point is, each time I was on a trail.

Sometimes I carry old maps to give away, because a map that’s been folded backwards multiple times and wedged under the bottom of a leaky water bladder still beats no map. And–is this an unpopular opinion?–your phone. You can burn through your battery quickly in the mountains while your phone searches for a reliable signal (tip: put it in airplane mode while you’re not using it). If it dies, or you drop it in the creek, you’re lugging an extra six-ounce brick in your pack. That’s almost a half-pound.

They’re also insultingly easy to lose. You can distinguish the poor souls frantically searching for their phones from the athletes training for the Leadville100 because the former are actually looking at the scenery as they run by. I’m sorry to tell you I’ve done it twice. Both times it fell out of my back pocket while I was taking care of business behind a tree.

Some of the new phones come with satellite capability that you can use to request assistance–or text your friends when you summit. This has caused both an uptick in smartphone sales and an increase in tourists who have no business in the wilderness.

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It’s true, you might be able to overcome poor planning with a text or call, but the last time I used it I had to wait five minutes for the satellite to glide into position up there in space. Fortunately, I was trying to notify my husband we’d be late for lunch, not cradling my hiking partner’s bear-mangled leg.

There is also some anecdotal evidence to suggest cell phones will be the death of us rather than the savior. Last year, two guys from New York decided to climb a fourteener on the drive out from Denver, a spur of the moment thing. They eventually lost the trail and called for help. Rescue volunteers stayed on the phone with them for more than an hour, guiding them back to the route and up to the summit.

It’s mysterious, this impulse to traipse around without a clue as soon as civilization is in the rearview mirror. I have friends who won’t drive to the gym without using Google Maps, but they’ll strike out across the face of a mountain because they’re pretty sure the creek is that way. Some vestige of the survival instinct that led our Ice Age forebears to cross the Bering Land Bridge, it’s a menace in the age of convenience stores and drone deliveries.

It was already late in the day when the New Yorkers reached the peak. It’s risky to be above tree line after noon, because thunderstorms creep up on you like Sleestaks – slow and then suddenly inescapable. They were still on the phone when they were struck by lightning. Thanks to the Colorado National Guard and the highest-altitude helicopter rescue in state history, they survived.

Most rescues aren’t that dramatic, but there are thousands of them every year, and the number is climbing as the forest becomes more crowded. Colorado just raised the fee on wildlife licenses and some vehicle registrations to cover a significant increase in search-and-rescue costs (the teams are volunteers; funding pays for administration, training, and equipment). If you want to try something crazy your first day in the state, may I suggest the venison-jerky shed at the turnoff to Guanella Pass?

Since you’re bringing your phone anyway, please consider subscribing to an app like Gaia or AllTrails. They’re not a substitute for a good printed map and a compass, but they do provide some useful data you would otherwise have to do math to obtain, like elevation gain over distance. This alone could save you from a mutiny. I was a little slow getting the hang of reading topography, so now before every hike, my husband demands, “This isn’t another uphill slog, is it?” To get him out the door, I play the animated AllTrails route preview. Sometimes it’s even of the trail we’re going to hike.

Have you been lost? How did it happen and how did you find your way back? Tell me about it!

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*My favorite Colorado maps are by Latitude 40. They’re designed at a smaller scale than many maps, so they cover more territory, and their color scheme is intuitive: green on paper generally means green on the ground, blue means water. But I also like the level of detail on the National Geographic maps. It’s a good idea to cross-reference them, because they won’t all contain the same information for trails (the FS frequently retires and opens new trails), private property (there are a surprising number of inholdings and not everyone is sanguine about you traipsing across their place), old mine pits, etc. It’s worth checking out the free maps you can find at visitor centers and Forest Service offices. They’re often quite good and some of them are designed for tourists, so they include local sights and experiences.

Coming soon: Garmin, Personal Locator Beacon, or phone? Best two out of three! And, the trouble with Fourteeners.

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BOOK NEWS

I spent the first weekend of May in New York with the Empresses, celebrating the release of Eleanor Anstruther’s Fallout and Margie Zable Fisher’s The Cabernet Club, and attending the Open Secrets Magazine personal storytelling summit, where Kimberly Warner joined a panel to discuss her memoir, Unfixed. This small sampling of titles shows the depth and breadth of Empress Editions’ shelf. They have a perfect book for you and everyone you love, and they are just a year old.

The following weekend, I attended panels at ThrillerFest, including the tribute to Poisoned Pen’s Barbara Peters, which included a three-way conversation with Peters, Douglas Preston and Lisa Scottoline. I hung out with fellow Sisters in Crime Desert Sleuth author Deborah J. Ledford, who has another Eva “Lightning Dance” Duran thriller out and a new series on the way, and I finally met one of my critique partners, Ruth Knafo Setton, who was a finalist for Best Standalone Novel with her atmospheric, history- and magic-fueled mystery, Zigzag Girl.

And I made it back to Scottsdale in time to stop by the book-release party for Imogen Vane’s The Department of Dark Errands, Book One: Shadowmarked, a tale of magic, espionage, and female friendship.

I am so grateful to those of you who have already preordered Up to Her Neck! If you emailed, DM’d or texted me to let me know, I’ve added you to the swag list (we are working on something very fun for that). The calendar for next year’s travels is starting to come together, too. I’d love to join your book club for an evening, or meet and sign your copy when I’m in your area. Do you have a favorite bookstore? Send the info my way and I’ll see if we can set up an event.

Get Up to Her Neck

March 15-18: St. Louis MO

Mid and late April, final dates TBD: San Antonio TX

April 27-May 1: New York, ThrillerFest

August 19-22: Nashville, Killer Nashville

September 1-5: Washington D.C., Bouchercon

Dates coming soon for: Buena Vista CO, Scottsdale AZ, Minneapolis MN, Little Rock, AR, Denver CO, Los Angeles, Chicago, and more.

Wishing you all a good start to the summer. Talk to you soon!

Elaine

Hello, and welcome to my late spring and early summer programming. I’ll be digging back in on Substack and Instagram, posting about cabin life so you don’t have to live it (the compost-shoveling, mouse-catching, pipe-busting parts). The main revisions for Up to Her Neck are back with my editor, and there is nothing to keep me from our parasocial relationship. I’ve been in NYC for Empress Editions events and Thrillerfest, but I’ll be back in Colorado before the end of the month and I can’t wait to share the beauty of spring in the mountains with you.

This week, I’m posting a short crime story. Is it what you can expect from my novel when it debuts next January? Not exactly. The writing style is different and Angie, the deposed Midwestern princess of “Booty Call”, doesn’t have much in common with Wendy, the self-made former flower child of Up to Her Neck. They can both be impulsive, but Angie is too busy looking over her shoulder to avoid the trouble ahead.

Another way to think about it is summarized in this tight little essay about the difference between hardboiled detective fiction and noir. (Yes, I’m muddying the waters, like many writers, by telling a noir-ish story in a soft-boiled style …) Wendy is someone you want on your team. Our friend Angie here … well, enter at your own risk.

Enjoy, and please share this post.

I was half-dozing in a lounger when I spotted my ex crouching next to the kiddie pool. There was no mistaking him, even across a crowded half-acre of swimsuits and umbrellas. Fred’s hair stands out like copper wire when he gets a little sun. For a ginger, he can really tan. His freckles start filling in until he’s taupe all over.

A half-hour later, he walked right past me with a full drink caddy — two Mai Tais, it looked like, and two milks in small plastic cups with lids. That seals that, I thought. I was happy not to make small talk, not to hear about his amazing kids.

I knew he was out, of course. He’d been sentenced to five years max and no one can do good behavior like my ex when he wants to. I didn’t care what he was doing in Scottsdale. Arizona’s a snowbird destination in February. It might’ve even been Fred who told me about it.

I was paying zero attention to him when a woman stood up in the shallowest end of the shallowest pool, dangling a carrot-haired toddler. Tall, honey-blonde, hips as narrow as a ladder. Just the type I always found leaning into him at the country club if I arrived a few minutes late.

I flipped through an abandoned Departures mag for another thirty minutes, then pulled a hoodie over my tankini and sauntered up to the bar. The bartender wasn’t much taller than me, with cherubic cheeks and a blue Hawaiian shirt stretched tight across a barrel chest.

I flashed my room card. “Can you duplicate the last order for the tall redhead?”

“Liquid olive branch?” he guessed.

“Wow, you’re fast.” I laughed and leaned up against the bar. “There’s no hard feelings on my end. When God closes a door, she opens a window, amirite?”

His brown curls bounced when he giggled. The name-tag read, “Anthony.” He was exactly the kind of bartender you expect at a place like this: a little too laidback, no doubt up for partying after his shift. I’d just have to drop the hint.

The tab was suspiciously cheap.

“Virgin Mai Tais. They’re half the price.” He brought his face close enough to whisper. “A lot of people just bring their own rum, like from the Liquor Vault?”

I returned his smile with a little extra warmth and asked him to keep an eye on my chair and tote bag.

The odor of damp diapers blended into the smell of chlorine and chemical coconut in the kiddie-pool area. A pair of boys in matching Sesame Street trunks were whacking each other with their arm floaties. Their father, wearing the same suit in adult, was too busy chatting up the cocktail waitress to referee.

A familiar shadow fell over me.

“Hey! Look what the cat dragged in.”

I looked up. And up. I’d minimized Fred’s height in my recollections, but he was six-four, and now he had a tall mate to match. Made sense, I guess. They say you swing like a pendulum the second time, if the first was bad enough. The toddler wavered right behind him and the older child trailed, chewing on her cup lid.

“Oh, hey.” I proffered the cardboard caddy. “I thought you guys might need more refreshments.”

Fred did the calculation in the seconds it took him to accept the drinks. I’d been watching them. His cheeks reddened under his freckle patches.

“We’re heading in soon,” he said. “The kids didn’t get my tanning ability.”

So that hadn’t changed, his way of talking as if something he was born with were an accomplishment.

“You’re sure they’re yours?”

“Oh, Ange. Still the funniest girl you know.”

“Oh, Fred. Still so predictable.” He looked good, though. A little heavier, which didn’t hurt, and faint lines at the corner of his eyes complemented their mysterious shade of green, somewhere between jade and oxidized copper. “Are you staying out of trouble?”

“It’s a lot easier without you around.” The old lopsided dimples were as deep as ever. He scanned the area behind me. “You here by yourself?”

I was deciding how to answer this when the wife ducked under his shoulder, jostling the tray. Fake Mai Tais splashed onto his forearm. She stepped half in front of him, all the lithe, evenly tanning length of her. Her lips parted in a pink lip-gloss crescent.

“Hi, I’m Michél.”

My nose could have nestled right above her cleavage.

“Michelle?” I held out a hand, friendly, unthreatening. “I’m Ange.”

“Me-shell.” She emphasized the second syllable.

“Me-shell,” I chirped. “It is so nice to meet you.”

“Ange? You mean, Angie? Fred’s …”

She pinched his trunks with two fingers and furrowed her brow, perhaps recalling stories he’d told her to explain why he could never apply to the state bar or hold a liquor license. That didn’t worry me. His version could be fact-checked in more than one midwestern precinct.

Or maybe she knew nothing.

I made little pistols with my hands and swiveled my hips in a sort of John-Wayne-at-the-disco move. “You got it, sista. Super rear-view-mirror ex. Your kids are adorable.”

“Ha!” Michél wrinkled her nose. “Especially right before nap time.” Without even looking she grabbed the older kid’s fist just as it made contact with the toddler’s temple. The little one wailed and wrapped both arms around Fred’s ankles.

“Hey, baby,” Michél said, conversationally, like a tiny tornado wasn’t attached to one hand, “why don’t you put these kids down, and I’ll help Angie put down these drinks?”

Fred slid his eyes between us. “It’s, ah, a little early, isn’t it?”

“It’s five o’clock somewhere.” Michél’s tone suggested she was used to not being questioned.

Their offspring started making enough noise to stand out from the general kiddie-pool mayhem. Fred shrugged. “Fine. I’ll do my best.”

He ditched the drinks on a table and scooped up a child in each arm. Wrestling arms. I recalled with photo accuracy the first time I’d noticed them. He had been poised above an opponent like a lion claiming a kill, his orange shag framing that anatomical dream of a jaw. He hadn’t been that good — too tall — but those long limbs were a pleasure to watch.

He looked over his shoulder once as he walked away, his expression more transactional than affectionate. Michél didn’t appear to notice. From her eleven-inch vantage point, she checked out my legs, my hoodie, and settled on my messy, sun-bleached topknot. “Want to take a load off?” she said.

We elbowed our way back to the adult pool, a good-looking Laurel and Hardy act, something for everyone. I dragged over an empty lounger and tucked my tote under my chair.

She flopped down and stretched out sun-pinked flamingo legs. “Oh, my God, have you ever done a vacation with kids? Prison has got to be more relaxing, right?” Her face flashed regret. “I’m sorry, that was stupid. I mean, obviously I wouldn’t know.”

I shook my head, no big deal. I didn’t really know, either. My parents had let me stew two nights without bail to make some point, and the defense attorney they hired took care of the rest. I signaled my bartender friend for a fresh daiquiri.

“Make it two.” She sounded about eighty percent on that.

“You sure?”

She nodded and five minutes later she was slurping her drink like a thirsty Labrador.

“Oh, my God, it tastes amazing. Fred and I quit drinking two years ago, right before Lars was born, so he could get his demons under control.” A slow sideways glance to check my reaction.

His demons? That meant I’d been downgraded, or his self-awareness had been upgraded. “Did that come out of therapy, or what?”

“He’s not exactly a therapy kind of guy, right?”

I allowed this Fred continuity with a half-shrug.

She scooted her chair closer and settled a confiding glance on me. “He’s doing TM. Transcendental meditation? His teacher is incredible.”

I don’t know a therapist who loosens tongues faster than Captain Jack, but booze has its downsides. Like the time Fred trashed our hotel room because we couldn’t find the TV remote. Turned out there wasn’t one; it wasn’t that nice of a hotel.

Michél and I were still on the upside, though, so I decided to go for it. “No more legal incidents, then, I guess?”

Her eyes enlarged in stages, until she resembled one of those funny little owls that lives in the desert. “Oh, my God! We had one, just one, but you know, epic, and I was like, no more. Figure it out.” She set down her half-empty cup and placed her hands on her knees. “But, oh my God, the kids are just like him. It kinda freaks me out.”

I proposed a drinking game to myself: Every time Michél said, “Oh, my God,” I’d gulp my cocktail. Myself accepted and I ordered another round in anticipation.

Michél caught on quickly and made sure to drop an OMG on the regular. Her eyeliner was tsunami-proof. Every other exchange ended in laughter or tears, or both, and those hard lines never budged.

Sometime into the third drink she straightened her neck in a series of small cricks and closed one eye so she could focus the remaining pale-hazel disc on me. “Fred says you turned him in,” she announced. “That’s why he took the whole … rap, I guess. And because of your dad.”

“Um, no, not exactly. Fred called me from the cabin. On their land line,” I added, in case she missed the implication. The memory still raised a murky foam of fury and fear in my chest. “That’s why the police dragged me into it.”

“But …” Michél popped forward, index fingers aimed at my chest. “You could have said you didn’t know for a fact he was at the cabin.”

I curled her fingers back into her fists and placed a hand on her forearm. “Did he tell you whose cabin he broke into?” They had surprised the owner, who’d come in late for a weekend of ice-fishing. I kept that last part to myself because maybe Fred had, too. “Anyway, Fred told me he was okay with how it worked out.” In a way. He’d winked at me in the courtroom that one time, I was pretty sure.

Michél stood up to adjust her bikini top and bypassed the chair on the way back down. She stayed on the ground next to the tote, her arms draped on our loungers as if she were taking a soak in the tub.

Our bartender materialized, bearing a tray with two large plastic cups of sparkling water and lime. He’d unbuttoned his shirt another notch. A thin gold chain glistened against his hair-free chest.

“Maybe it’s time for your friend to take a nap? Or something?”

“Yesh,” Michél agreed. “You can close us out.” Which sounded like, “clushussoot.”

He smiled in relief.

“Pushinmyruum,” Michél said. “Two. Oh. One.” Her fingers found the corresponding tally.

As soon as the bartender walked away, those washed-out hazel eyes refocused on me. “But Fred gave you all of the loot, the jewelry, the …” her voice pitched fast and high. Heads swiveled to catch a glimpse of the brewing drama. I stood up fast, dumping the last of my drink down her suit. Her face opened up into a clown gape, her brows folded into angry little tents, but not a sound came out.

“Let’s go.” I grabbed her wrist and pulled until she got her feet under her. As we walked past the bar I motioned that I’d be back and pointed at my chair.

Fred and Michél had scored a corner suite on the second floor, overlooking an Astroturf lawn ringed in palm trees. She didn’t have a key, so I tapped on the door while she monologued the kids’ bedtime preparations to me.

“They could be in the bath,” she said. “I mean, not Fred, obviously. They don’t even make tubs that big. It would have to be a trough. Or a coffin.”

She was draped over my shoulders and the weight of all those healthy bones was pushing my back into an uncomfortable arch.

“Did you say coffin?” I tried to ease her against the wall, but she crooked her arm more tightly around my neck.

Her eyes widened into that unnerving stare. “Yesh, I did.”

I bent my knees and used her skunked reflexes to shift her toward the door just as Fred opened it a few inches. Michél slid into the crack, one arm and half of one leg disappearing like a magic trick. She cramped two fingers around my wrist. I pried them loose.

Fred frowned. “Not so fast, Ange. I can’t get her into bed myself.”

“The evidence says otherwise.” But I was hooked. I wanted to see this new life, this phoenix-from-the-ashes act. Did they drive a nice car? Were the kids tiny geniuses? Was Fred really reformed?

I stepped inside.

Fred closed the door and slipped the security chain into its notch. He held a finger to his lips while Michél struggled in his other arm, an animated rag doll swinging at the small refrigerator. “Beers.” She stretched the word into two long beats.

“Ixnay.” Fred tightened his hold on her waist. “Let’s take a raincheck.”

Michél reared up, fast as a cat on the pounce, catching him on the chin with the top of her head. He fell back like a dropped rake and she sunk onto her haunches. A hand slowly went to her scalp, the fingers massaging the point of contact in a detached manner.

The curtains were closed and the only light was a small bulb over the sink, but I could see the sleeper sofa was unoccupied. A small pop-up playpen sat empty in the corner.

“Michél,” I said. “Where are the kids?”

Confusion loosened the skin on her face, softened her perky features. She looked younger like that, and innocent. My enthusiasm had done a one-eighty. The last thing I wanted was to step any deeper into this mess. But there was Fred at my feet, his eyelids flickering in the artificial twilight. His heart beat rapidly in the thin skin of his throat.

“We should probably call a doctor.” I found the switch for the overhead lights and flipped it, illuminating a room in disarray. Stuffing protruded from a throw pillow, discarded clothing lined the baseboard. An ice bucket was capsized in the middle of a large wet spot in the nubby beige carpet.

I circuited the room until I located the phone.

“Oh, ho, no, no, no. We can’t have that.” Michél pushed herself upright and staggered into the bedroom, where she started rustling something and shushing herself. Her voice swung in my direction again. “Don’t call. Anyone! I mean it.”

Fred’s fugitive days looked well in the rearview mirror, but maybe there was some other problem just crying out for a law-enforcement officer with probable cause. For instance, what kind of kids sleep through this much ruckus? Dimetapp-nap kids, that’s who. I picked up the receiver.

The front desk clerk had just answered when I felt a hard tap on my shoulder. I turned to find Michél pointing a chunky black pistol at my chest.

“Snitch,” she whispered, crisp as a fall apple. “Hang up.” She’d pulled a white crochet dress over her swimsuit and I felt at a double disadvantage, half-dressed and totally unarmed.

I mumbled something about a mistake and set the receiver back on its stand.

“Fred might really be hurt,” I said. “Someone should check his pupils and his, um, pulse.”

Michél grabbed her cell phone from the coffee table and shoved it under my nose. “You can use the flashlight on here. And keep your voice down.”

I choreographed it perfectly for her, turning toward Fred, bending my head to focus on the screen.

The first blow didn’t quite do it. I remember a second, but after that nothing until I realized my hands were brushing against someone who was dragging me by my sweatshirt. Michél deposited me on the far side of Fred’s torso and straddled me, waving the gun with one hand.

“What the fuck, Michél?” A goose egg had set its perimeter behind my right ear and was busy growing into it. I shifted my limbs, making sure they still worked, and rolled my eyes around the room. The bedroom door was closed and the sound of AM Radio pop filtered through. Mellow hits of the Seventies. Maybe there were living, breathing, safe children back there.

She prodded Fred with a foot. He grunted lightly but didn’t move. Blood dribbled from the corner of his mouth.

“You might want to tip his head to the side,” I said.

She made a disbelieving sound low in her throat and nudged him harder. “Fred, I’ve got her, you can get up.”

Fred pushed halfway up on one elbow then dropped back to the floor with a groan.

“Get up!” Michél hissed. “You have to make her tell us where the watch is.”

They couldn’t be serious. A pawn shop would pay a fraction of the price, and anyone half legit would turn it down as soon as they saw the inscription. “Where what is?” I hissed back at her.

“Shhhhh!! Don’t play dumb with me!” Michél turned her toes on my ribs. “Where’s the watch, Angie?”

I hated the way she said my name, really the way most people say it, whiny on the “n,” long on the “ie.”

“I’m sure it’s on the bottom of Lake Minnetonka.” I wiped my forehead in the universal sign for missing a close call. “Fred would still be in jail if we had the freaking watch, any of the things she said he took.”

“Oh, right, it’s so lucky Fred didn’t get any of the goods. Give me a break, Angie. If you’d given it up, they would have gone way easier on him.”

She stomped her foot next to my ear. Someone in the room below thumped on the ceiling, but I didn’t get my hopes up. This was a party hotel. You’d have to blow up a bathtub meth lab to get someone to call the cops around here.

“You mean,” I said, “if he hadn’t put an old woman in the hospital.” Old, but spry enough to cross-country ski ten miles for a little solo ice-fishing. Probably why she survived.

“Don’t change the subject! We’re talking about the watch. Solid gold, diamond bezel, Ladymatic.” She had done her own homework. Fred was never that into details. “And the ring, too. Where’s that ring, Angie?”

Feet shuffled outside the front door. Michél pressed the pistol into my sternum and shook her head. A shadow passed along the bottom edge, paused for a second and moved on. She sighed and turned her attention back to me. “Diamonds and sapphires! I mean, who even keeps that in a cabin? In the woods?”

What did my dad say about drunks? Never argue, always agree.

“It’s crazy right? I don’t even believe that stuff was really there. I don’t have the ring, I don’t have the watch. What would I even do with them? I mean, the photos were all over the place. Her husband was a senator, for God’s sake, and the watch was a gift for their …”

“Stop talking.” Michél squeezed the gun handle, causing it to dip toward my stomach. I hoped she knew how the thing fired. I really didn’t want to get shot, but to get shot accidentally? Too stupid for words.

She put a wrist to her temple, where a curtain of sweat was forming. “I mean, keep talking, but only about the watch, the jewelry. Where is it, how do we get it?”

I shook my head, loaded regret and God-I-wish into my eyes. “It’s in the lake, like I said. Or, maybe, I don’t know, it’s in some safety-deposit box somewhere. That woman saw a chance to get the insurance and she took it.” The woman had in fact received a very nice payout. I’d know, my dad was the agency president.

Michél moved over to Fred and used her free hand to untie his swim trunks and tug at the drawstring. I wished hard for a slow-motion concussion to take her down, but she was looking sharper by the minute.

“Here’s what’s going to happen. I’m going to get this rope …” She was panting unevenly and not making much progress.

“I could do it for you.” The piña coladas, and the lump above my ear, were messing with my multi-tasking abilities but I was pretty sure I could undo Fred’s shorts and come up with a better plan than sitting on my ass pleading with an armed drunk at the same time. “You’ll still have the gun.”

She nodded a curt assent and stepped aside. An atonal buzz filled the air as I fiddled with his trunks. Michél was humming along with the radio. She sang the chorus in a spooky murmur. “Angie, Angie… Remember all those nights you crie-hi-hi-hied.”

“It’s ‘we cried.’” Fred and I had sung it together enough times. The drawstring was sewn into his suit. I flipped down the waistband to show her. She scowled in disbelief.

“Just figure it out, snitch. Figure it out and…”

It took a moment for us to register the tapping on the door. Maybe the downstairs neighbor had called security after all.

“Michelle?” A male voice. “Um, Michelle?” Louder. “I have your tab.”

Cherubic bartender, my new favorite person on the planet.

Michél tiptoed over to the peephole, owled her eyes at me and mouthed, “Oh, shit.”

He knocked again, this time with a hard object. “I have to close this out, my shift is over.”

“Just bill it to my room!” she called.

“We don’t have a credit card for this room. I’m sorry, it’s, um, it’s kinda weird.”

Not for Fred. I wondered what story he’d told the front-desk clerk. His face was peaceful except for the trickle of blood. I tipped his head to the side.

Michél opened the door the length of the chain. The nose of the gun wriggled behind her back, aiming at the ceiling, the floor, me, Fred. “That is weird but, I’m sorry, my husband is asleep. The kids, too. I could come down later to sign it.”

“Well, actually.” Throat clearing. “My manager said I needed to get a credit card from you before I go home?”

My window had opened and I was climbing through it. If Michél shot me, at least my body wouldn’t end up dumped behind a saguaro on the outskirts of town. “Hi, Anthony! It’s me, Angie. I can give you a card.”

“Great!” Equal parts enthusiasm and relief. “I can just …”

Michél slammed the door in his face. She refocused the muzzle on my nose. “What you’re going to do is shut up.”

She stomped back to Fred’s prone body, waving me toward the rear window. I stayed put. Anthony rapped again, rat-a-tat-tat. A manager was invoked.

Fred groaned and rolled into Michél, knocking her a little off-kilter. I threw myself on top of her, slamming her first into the kitchen bar-top, then sideways onto the entryway linoleum. The gun unloaded into the ceiling overhead, showering us in paint chips and drywall dust.

Michél screeched and dropped the gun. A two-child chorus started in the bedroom, as piercing as a fire engine, joined a moment later by a car alarm in the lot. I crawled over her, scrambling to get the pistol before she recovered from the shock. I had pinned the side of her face with my midriff and the gun was in easy reach, but my hand froze above it. Who knew where it had been, what crimes it had been involved in? Fred was curled into the fetal position and Michél was flat under me. I looked guilty by process of elimination.

“He said it wasn’t loaded,” Michél squeaked into my bellybutton. “I could’ve killed us.”

Someone rapped on the door with real authority. “Mrs. Zeman?” The Lady Darth Vader delivery was encouraging.

I jumped up and yanked the chain free as the electronic lock released. The door swung open, flooding the room with tangerine sunset rays. A tower of curves and a boss-lady bun stepped into the opening, followed by Anthony, who was waving a ticket book in front of him like a metal detector. He moved to the side and the rays spangled over the mess behind me.

“Oh, man,” Anthony said.

“Call the police.” The woman’s commanding alto cut through the din.

Michél jackknifed into a sitting position. “No, no! Do not call the cops. Please.”

I cleared my throat and pointed to the bedroom with real show-girl flair. “There are children here.”

“No shit, Sherlock.” The manager shuffled into the pistol, which skittered across the linoleum. It stopped at the edge of the carpet, just shy of Michél’s hand. She slithered fast as a snake toward it.

The manager placed the toe of a red roach-killer cowboy boot on her knuckles. “Do not even.”

“Oh, my god,” Michél whimpered.

Anthony caught my eye and smiled. My fuchsia-and-orange striped canvas bag swung behind his back.

“I can escort this guest to the office so she can make a statement,” he said.

The manager handed him a cell phone. “Do not leave me alone with these assholes. Use this.” She motioned me to step outside the room with Anthony.

I looked back at Fred, still prone, prodding his jaw. His red mane lolled in my direction and for a second I thought he caught my eye and winked. It might have been the sunset.

The exterior lights blinked on as I stepped onto the balcony. I held my hand out to Anthony. “Thanks for getting my tote.”

The bag sagged behind his back as he stared over my shoulder. I turned to face our dark reflections in the glass behind me. I watched his image set the manager’s phone on the sill and push up the cuff of my hoodie.

“Nice tan line,” he said. “C’mon. My car’s in the lot.”

Summer madness has started early in the Rocky Mountains this year. The snow passed us up for the East Coast and the heat dome is evaporating what’s left. Campers started a forest fire last week, close to one of the most popular hiking routes in the Collegiate Peaks Wilderness. All of us are beyond indebted to the Chaffee County Fire crew who showed up fast, like they always do, and shut it down.

And people are already trying to summit Colorado’s 14,000 foot peaks, aka Fourteeners, which is why our neighbor Rocky spent part of last weekend winching an engineering student out of a snow-mud ditch.

Dear tourist friends, maybe stay home for a bit! If you do come early, come prepared, leave no trace, and if you must build a fire, make sure the ashes are cold to the touch before you walk away. You should always check for fire restrictions in the county you’re visiting, as well as on the USFS’s website for the forest, like this one here.

This week, I was going to tell you about the first time friends stayed with us at the cabin, but as I was writing, the post put down a deposit on its own place. Didn’t even ask me to cosign. There’s a fun questionnaire at the end, so please read through, share, and click that heart.

When we first bought our cabin in the Rocky Mountains, we planned to rent it out for part of the summer. The income would help pay for the property taxes and expenses like having the outhouses serviced, and we could start saving to redo the second cabin. But the cuter the first cabin got, the less Michael liked this plan.

I was torn. Running a good rental is a lot of work, especially in old buildings, which was something of a specialty of mine. For roughly ten years, I managed two tri-plexes, a four-plex, several small houses, and a pair of trailer parks with mobile homes that dated to the post World War II boom. Our rentals were not “luxury apartments.” There were no gyms, no pools, no front desk.

I did add washers and dryers whenever possible, because you know what is a luxury? Doing the laundry at home in your underwear. And they usually had a charming detail or two: built-in cabinets, good natural light, a porch or patio, vintage kitchen tile.

I really liked taking a place that had outlived its brochure moment, that was no longer in style, that had been smothered under layers of landlord-beige paint and those horrid fake-butcher-block laminate countertops, and making it a home someone might aspire to live in again. But more than anything, I enjoyed the tenants.

Mrs. Treviño, an avid Fox News viewer, insisted we pick up the rent in person, which gave her a chance to talk about her son, a perfumer’s nose who lived in Paris. Maria M. ran a tortoise-rescue community out of her double-wide. The tortoises arrived in the mail; she would nurse and foster them, then ship them back out in a cardboard box with a piece of lettuce.

Johnny H. was busted for pirating electricity because the city utility wouldn’t accept his only ID, a paper card from the county jail. He was the best liar I’ve ever met. I knew he’d helped install the pirated sub-meter, but I still kind of believed him when he said he had no idea where the power in his trailer came from.

If we had cabin renters, they’d be a somewhat self-selecting group: able to afford a trip to the mountains yet willing to use an outhouse. But still, people from all over! And I knew I could make the cabin just the right balance of rustic and comfy.

Of course, being a landlady isn’t the same as being in the hospitality business. If you’re managing your long-term rental properties well, you and your tenants don’t hear from each other too often. So, I called a friend who owned and managed a small historic inn in South Texas.

“Tell me your worst stories,” I said over margaritas at San Antonio’s Liberty Bar.

She laughed. “You mean like the time the French guy literally shit the bed?”

I remembered just then that the cabin is twenty miles from the nearest laundromat.

Water causes most of the trouble in rental relationships — too much or too little, too hot or too cold. Johnny H. is actually the second-best liar I’ve met. I had a tenant once who insisted water was leaking intermittently from the ceiling in his bedroom. He even texted me a video of his girlfriend holding a sopping wet t-shirt they’d allegedly used to clean up the deluge.

I sent the handyman twice, the plumber three times. Finally, the plumber offered to write me a letter swearing there was no leak and no sign of there ever having been a leak. This was the same tenant who paid a deposit for one dog, then brought in another dog and two cats and claimed they were all service animals.

Pets are almost as much trouble as water. A decade ago, we’d decided to sell a beautiful old house that contained three apartments, one up and two down. The gentleman who lived in the downstairs back unit had been there for years, long before we bought the place. He owned a feisty chihuahua*, who chased me around the apartment like a Mad Max extra for a full hour while the Home Depot appliance-delivery team changed out the stove.

The couple upstairs had moved in less than a year earlier. The apartment was painted a pale but luminous cream that highlighted the original wood molding. It had a curving oak staircase and original Craftsman windows overlooking a yard filled with large pecan trees.

According to their application and lease, the tenants didn’t have any pets, but they were evasive and unenthusiastic when I called to make an appointment to photograph their place. This is generally what we in the business call A Bad Sign. If a tenant doesn’t want you to enter their apartment under any circumstances, it’s almost always one of three things:

1. They’re up to something illegal. This was Texas, so often it was just pot-smoking, but in the meth-making heyday, nobody believed you put foil in the windows to keep out the sun.

2. Sometimes there’s a cleanliness issue, like hoarding or … well, I’ll save that example for another time when I know you’re not eating and reading.

Friends of mine used to rent an apartment across the hall from a reclusive couple. The house was a stately old wreck, covered in forest-green shingles and vines. But the leaves up and down the building’s western side were brown and wrinkled in the spring, summer, and fall. Very mysterious. Until the couple finally moved out and the owner discovered their toilet wasn’t working … … … . Yes, the other story was worse.

3. But it’s most likely the tenants have snuck in a pet. I did this myself, of course, in my callous twenties. Guy, if you’re out there, I am sorry (although, P. S., my neighbors told me you let yourself into my apartment without notice on at least one occasion and had a beer in the kitchen with some other dude. Let’s call it even.)

One spring we toured a beat-up bungalow that was for sale. The tenant walked backwards right in front of me for the entire tour, stepping on my toes, talking at auctioneer speed about the weather (hot), the neighborhood (good tacos on the corner), the Spurs <3. We were checking out the back room, which overlooked a gnarled oak that may or may not have been growing into the attic, when she stopped in front of a set of bifold doors.

“Do you have to look in the closet?” she asked.

Well, now I did.

She took a deep breath. “He’s my pet. Okay?!?!”

After I nodded agreement, she tugged the door open just enough to reveal a ’possum curled up on a pillow on the floor.

“He likes to hang out on the hangers, too,” she said. “He just comes and goes by himself.”

Reader, we did not buy that house.

I’ve thought about starting an advice column for tenants. I even have a name for my fictional advisor: Satiah. The answers would be so short, it could just be a Twitter/X account.

Dear Satiah: I want to get a cat, but my lease says I can’t have one, which is so dumb! Cats clean themselves and they hunt mice, too, which is like a free service. Should I just sneak one in and hope the landlord doesn’t notice?

Satiah: No.

Maybe it could be a phone line, answered by a real person.

Anyway! My reluctant tenants finally relented after I promised I would be with the photographer the entire time — and pointed out that under the terms of their lease they had to make reasonable accommodations. I was apprehensive as we unlocked the door and walked up those beautiful oak stairs.

The place looked great. The kitchen counters gleamed. The bathroom sparkled. HGTV could not have done a better job staging the living room. And these guys always paid their rent on time. I was growing more suspicious by the minute.

Finally, all that remained was the bedroom. I walked ahead and opened the blinds. There, on the dresser, a trumpet-sized glass bong glittered red, blue, and gold. Phew. Why they hadn’t just popped it in the freezer, I don’t know.

“Make sure to get the windows,” I said, slipping a scarf around my hand. I carefully picked up the bong and set it behind the dresser. And came eye to snout with a yellow and white snake slithering inside a glass case that ran the length of the wall. Its middle was as thick as my calves and (understandably) it looked mad as hell at the midday glare bouncing off the wood floor.

Maybe you’re thinking, Cool! An albino python.

I was thinking: chihuahua. If you’ve spent any time in an old house, you know a snake could swallow a water buffalo for lunch and still squeeze through the utility crawlspaces before bedtime.

When I brought it up to the tenants, they didn’t say, Don’t worry, it’s just a Ball! (Google “Burmese pythons and Everglades.”) Or, “Of course we never let it out of the display case!” Because that would be cruel.

I would have given that chihuahua even odds, but was that really my call? A good landlady rule of thumb is to avoid situations that could make the 5 o’clock news (or 32 million views on Reels). I made them promise they would alert me if the snake slithered out of their sight for one second.

Then, dear reader, we sold that house.

*yes, “feisty chihuahua” is redundant.

Okay, tell me:

A. Would you have let the tenants keep the snake in the apartment?

B. What’s the best holiday rental experience you’ve ever had?

C. What’s the most unusual “pet” you’ve met?

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BOOK NEWS!

I received edits for Up to Her Neck last week from the great Molly Zakoor, and I feel incredibly lucky to be working with her. She offered so much insight regarding stakes and pacing, while showing me what the story is and what it can be. When I’m done, Wendy’s story will be the best possible version of itself, and I can’t wait for you to read it. Once the editing rounds are complete, it’s off to the printer in time for ARCs (Advanced Reader Copies). Do you have a favorite book reviewer or content creator who might be a good fit for a twisty midlife thriller? Did I just describe you? Let me know!

You can preorder anytime, at bookshop.org and barnesandnoble.com. DM me your receipt if you do. I’m working on a special thank-you for early birds.

This is the second installment in a saga about found community, which I know all of us on the left have been trained to idolize. But sometimes you should leave things you find in the gravel right there for someone else to pick up. Mostly the experience has been a microcosm of important life lessons, and I guess I needed a little reeducation. Please check in with part one if you haven’t already - this is not a standalone post.

Speaking of murderous inspiration ;) read on for a little more fun book news, and please click the heart and share!

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A few years ago, our little mountain historical society applied for a grant to digitize its large cache of photographs from the late 19th and early 20th century. The photos document everyday life and work in the canyon, from hauling ore to community dances. A miner in a neat suit holds the hand of a small girl in a lace-trimmed dress and pigtails. Two women ride horses Western style, looking as free and ready for action as any man. Community dances and reunions contrast with images of the grinding, dirty labor, the rough mine buildings, the giant gears and life-threatening machinery. And, of course, there are many burros <3.

The grant would cover half the cost of scanning and tagging the photos, the society would pay for the rest. The only requirement was that we agreed to make the images available to the public for research and education.

No problem, I thought, as I finished the application and hit send. I was excited; it felt like my first substantive contribution to the society’s work. This was, I should add, well before the “smelter” standoff.

Emily, our official historian, helped write the narrative for the grant. We were awarded the funds a few months later and the society hired Emily’s daughter to do the work. We got tantalizing updates at our meetings as the project progressed: grainy images of women atop a mountain, the postmistress in front of her cabin.

A year passed, and our follow-up report was due to the foundation. How would we make the photos available to the public, I asked. Emily said she had considered placing them in a university collection, but she rejected that option because the institutions would own the images.

This … let’s call it a misunderstanding … was so easy to disprove, I should have realized something was up. In the meantime, we hadn’t actually seen the digitized images. A slideshow was arranged in the meadow between the cabins during our celebration of the town’s 14oth anniversary.

Emily narrated a few dozen photographs by firelight while we huddled under blankets in foldout chairs.

“Haven’t we already seen these?” someone whispered when the image of the postmistress appeared. “Where are the rest of them?”

Emily floated the idea of just keeping the photos on a Google drive for the society’s use, but this wouldn’t have met the terms of the grant any more than a partial slideshow twelve miles up The Worst Road in North America.

I researched inexpensive software that would allow us to host the images ourselves and collect fees for licensing them. The more bookish of the Lowe brothers, inspired perhaps by Emily’s palpable opposition, offered to investigate this option himself. Shortly after, he fired off an email announcing that a museum in Leadville was using the software … and the software didn’t have the capability to make the images available to the public.

I almost threw my computer through the wall when I read this. The museum was licensing a lower tier of the software with less functionality, which would have taken all of five minutes to figure out. But Tall White Guy Authority had struck again.

We were so close, though. I updated the proposal for the next meeting. The overall reception seemed positive; the questions and comments were all heading in the right direction.

Until Emily announced the society didn’t own the images. They belonged to the people who’d donated them, she said. Many of those people, you’ll recall, happen to be her ancestors.

This was such an unexpected claim, I was disarmed for a minute. Many – most? – of the images had been held by the society for decades. They had appeared in society publications and local newspapers long before Emily was designated our historian. Emily herself had posted several on our Facebook page, with a link back to her genealogy business (!!).

More than that, if the photos didn’t belong to us, why did we pay to have them digitized with the help of a public grant? And with the explicit promise that we would make them available to the public? But we tabled the issue once again. There were rotten logs to be replaced and trees to be felled.

I contacted a society member who’d been around for its earlier days. “Most of the photos came from people and family collections and were given to CCCHS,” he replied. “I believe they were given to the Society to further promote the historical area.”

I shared this evidence with the society in as diplomatic, non-I-told-you-so fashion as I could manage. I was an overheated tea kettle at this point, steaming quietly in public, spouting off at home. All these priceless photos trapped forever on one woman’s hard drive. Etcetera. Michael endured many a rant on the calamity.

If we could have come up with a proposal involving chainsaws, it would have been done years ago, but this deathless issue, which lit me up like Roman candle, was the agenda equivalent of listening to a white-noise app while blindfolded. It’s possible some part of my brain was just furious I’d become that person at meetings. I mean, why not bird-watching?

Finally, several months later, Emily gave us access to a Google drive containing hundreds of scans. And you know what? All’s well that ends well! That’s what I said to Michael as I arranged for Emily to meet with the historian at our local heritage museum.

The heritage museum has a large online digital archive and they were very interested in hosting the photographs. Our collection would be labeled within the database. The cost to the society would be minimal and we could earn money licensing the images.

Unfortunately, on the day of the meeting, one of our members was sick. I rescheduled by email. Emily and her husband went anyway …

… And came back with a proposal to write a grant for the Moonshine Jones cabin. They didn’t even discuss the photos.

What was especially remarkable about this turn of events was that the society had just decided officially not to pursue funding for the Moonshine Jones cabin.

“Just quit,” Michael said. “This is a waste of your time.”

Something was up, absolutely, and I should have caught on at this point. But we’d come so far. And I’d signed my name to that damn application, which said we’d make the photos available to the public.

You might be wondering at this point, how much was that grant?

Six hundred dollars.

It’s the principle, okay?

I arranged another meeting with the heritage museum, and this one I did not miss. Emily didn’t attend, but I wasn’t concerned. She lived almost two hours away. At the next gathering of the society, I had the proposal all in order.

It was our big annual in-person meeting in the old mining town, which is always followed by a potluck. Appetizers, hot dishes, and desserts were crowded onto a table in the kitchen. A sizable crowd lined the chairs, benches, and the ledge in front of the fireplace. Peace and understanding were in the air. I even said Michael and I would install the Smelter sign, several yards away from our cabin. (Yes, I know, I’m a pushover sometimes.)

The presentation went well, a few questions were asked. Heads were nodding. People were smiling. Someone made a motion in favor of placing the images with the heritage museum.

Then Emily raised her hand. She was close to tears. She didn’t know about the meeting, she said. She hadn’t received the emails.

The room exploded. A charismatic woman named Kerry* immediately took her part. It was outrageous to exclude Emily after everything she’d done, Kerry said. She couldn’t vote for the resolution. The room swung in an instant.

I’d like to say I calmly picked up that hand grenade, stuck the pin back in, and returned it to Emily’s fine-boned hands. And maybe I would have. But the society’s secretary spoke up: She didn’t want this project to take ten years and that’s what was going to happen if we kicked it down the road again.

Kerry was apoplectic. It wasn’t going to take ten years, she said. That was a ridiculous and unfair thing to say.

Well, our secretary pointed out, it’s already taken five.

She was right. We’d received the grant in 2020, during the pandemic. Five years of working around objections, of addressing manufactured problems, of wondering whether I was dealing with incompetence or clever foot-dragging.

Reader, I lost my shit. Not Rahm Emanuel On Days That End With Y Lose-my-shit; maybe close to Amy Klobuchar With a Stapler. But as I often remind my youngest Terrier, barking at people does not calm them down. It was over. The issue was tabled. Again.

Emily came up to me afterward, victorious, still upset. She was definitely crying now. I wasn’t conciliatory. I accused her of acting in bad faith, of wanting to keep the images for herself. And that’s when she told me: She had been diagnosed with dementia.

I sent one final email to Emily and the society’s officers that compiled the history of the project and the meetings, the avenues we’d explored and rejected to meet our funding obligations. And then I let it go.

This was my found community, but it was Emily’s found family. Was it better to let her enjoy the cabin and the place that means so much to her while she still can? Was it really more important to share these images for a theoretical public than to let her safeguard her personal connection? I could’ve argued it both ways for you, but I was finally done.

I didn’t attend the next meeting, where the society voted to place the images with the heritage museum. Emily is working with the team preparing the files for the upload.

But reader, that Smelter sign is never going to be in our yard.

UPDATE: While we were visiting the cabin with our neighbors last month, I learned that the images will be added to the heritage museum’s database this year. Fingers crossed, y’all. I will post a link when it happens, because so many of these photos are really special. Remember, it doesn’t matter who gets the credit, as long as it gets done. That’s what I’m telling myself, anyway ;) But, really, this would have died on the vine if not for the society’s secretary. It can really help to have someone versed in corporate diplomacy on your team.

Oh, also? It turns out the society is (or is again? unclear!) responsible for the Moonshine Jones cabin. And a good thing, too. We were running out of buildings that need new roofs.

*A reminder that names have been changed and the timeline has been condensed in places. Also, this is just my version of events ;)

BOOK NEWS PART TWO

There is nothing like an announcement in Publishers Marketplace to make a writer feel like she’s arrived!

In addition to the pithy description above, my genius publisher describes Up to Her Neck like this:

Perfect for fans of Lisa Jewell and Deanna Raybourn!

She wanted a fresh start. She got a body instead.

Empty-nested and newly single at forty-seven, Wendy McFarquhar drains her savings to buy a ramshackle hot-springs resort in an old mining town. The plan: renovate, reopen by ski season, and reinvent her life along the way. The reality: before she can welcome a single guest, the town’s resident troublemaker turns up dead on her property.

Wendy suspects the mining corporation trespassing nearby-but their rugged engineer seems determined to distract her. The sheriff detains her best friend. And suddenly, Wendy is knee-deep in secrets, suspects, and very bad timing.

Her ex-husband refuses to sign the divorce papers, putting her bank loan — and the resort — at risk. Her oldest daughter is dating one of the suspects. Her youngest is coming out, moving home, and bunking in Wendy’s sixteen-foot Airstream. Now a moderately fit suburban realtor with a fear of heights must uncover the truth, save the hot springs, and figure out how to parent grown children without making things worse.

It’s available for preorder at bookshop.org and barnesandnoble.com, so please make my year and plan ahead for early 2027! Preorders can make or break books these days, especially debuts. If you do preorder, DM me a copy of your receipt, because I’ll be planning some fun preorder incentives, and you will be grandmothered in! XX

We have snow, deep, heavy, and sparkling like diamonds in the sun this morning. The mood in town is electric, and at least one of my favorite businesses (a local distillery) called an all-staff sick day yesterday so they could go out and ride. But we need more - the central Colorado area as a whole is between 50-69% of average, and the forecast is clear for the next week. Snow dances, please.

Read on for book publishing news and a peek at the full cover for Up to Her Neck, and find me on Instagram (@elainemwolff) for pics from this week’s trip to the cabin. We made it up Wednesday with some of our neighbors just ahead of the storm. Please share, like, etc!

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I’m a member of my local historical society, but I no longer go to the meetings. Believe me when I say it’s for the best. The last one I attended? I yelled at an older woman. (That is, a woman older than me, although not by much.)

Maybe it was more like a raised voice, with short, declarative sentences. But in the context of a historical society that makes librarians look like the crowds at a European soccer match, it felt like yelling. I was upset afterwards because I’d upset her, but also because my husband was right.

The first month we spent at the cabin, I was too busy reading appliance manuals to give much thought to the ghost town up the road. It was a half mile from our place and I walked to it now and then for a break from our endless to-do list. Most of the buildings were boarded up, and I never spotted a soul.

I’d peek in the windows of the schoolhouse, a narrow box with tidy four-pane windows. Then I’d cross the dirt road and study the small brass plaque describing the settlement’s founding. It contained the name of the man who’d registered our mining claim in 1900! Something to look into once we got the water heater running.

I hadn’t had a hot shower in a week when we met our first neighbor. He was leaning on a mountain bike at the end of our driveway, staring at our silver Airstream as if he’d just encountered Fitzcarraldo hauling his riverboat over the mountains of South America.

“Welcome to the neighborhood,” he said, all chipper and well-groomed. He’d dropped by to invite us to a meeting of the historical society at the old post office. Most of the cabin owners would be there, maybe even our local Forest Ranger. It would be more people than we’d seen in a month. I RSVP’d yes on the spot.

Michael was not enthused. “We didn’t buy this place so we could go to meetings,” he said. “You’re going to regret it.”

But it was fun, at first. We weren’t the only new kids on the block. A couple from Austin had bought the old bordello, which still contained the “waiting bench” and a recipe for corn whiskey handwritten on the door jamb. He was an architect from Louisiana, where Michael went to school; she was a former lobbyist who used to hang out at Eeyore’s Birthday Party the same time I did (i. e. before it became “family friendly”). We hit it off right away.

I threw myself into it, brokering a truce between the society and an annual sports event and landing a small donation to our preservation fund. Michael and I were outsiders, in a way, the only members who owned our land, but I felt like part of our quirky little community.

The cabins in the “ghost town” belong to the residents, but they sit on Forest Service property and cannot be used as full-time homes. They’re still a relatively affordable way to get a rustic summer house, so the owners are a wonderfully diverse lot.

The neighbor who invited us to our first meeting had built and sold a home-siding business. He talked like a college professor – behavioral economics or theoretical physics. His brother, who co-owned a cabin with him, was pure Danny McBride energy. They shared an enthusiasm for addressing problems with chainsaws and earth movers. For the purposes of this story, we’ll refer to them as the Lowes*.

Danny Lowe offered to store our Airstream in his barn for free that first winter. Free, that is, unless you count us buying his used snowmobile, which sat behind our house for two years before we unloaded it for a fraction of our cost. But that’s a story for another day.

The town’s seasonal population also included a real-estate agent who liked to shoot targets on Sunday, a tech entrepreneur with a new baby, a retired social-studies educator, a software engineer, a credit-union executive and her wife who worked at a natural-foods store, a violinist, and a retired building contractor.

And, of course, the woman I would one day get into it with during a Facebook livestream.

Let’s call her Emily. She’s thin and elegant, with long silver hair and a voice that fills with childlike enthusiasm when she’s talking about her family’s history.

Emily is a relative newcomer to town, but she’s descended from one of the original miners. After she discovered her connection to the canyon, she compiled a book of oral histories, collected photographs, and figured out where the bodies were buried … in the old cemetery. Armed with Emily’s research, the society installed white crosses on the unmarked graves.

Eventually the group made Emily its official historian, which I believe is the position Joseph Stalin held with the CPSU. Just kidding. He was the secretary.

The society was formed in the Seventies by a group of cabin owners because the Forest Service had started condemning property and burning vacant cabins in the canyon’s defunct mining boom towns. If it weren’t for the society, and a sympathetic ranger, nothing would be left now but a few sunken foundations.

The original members restored several buildings, created three museums, and published a booklet containing a brief history of the canyon.

But if the founders were the scrappy builders and visionaries, the modern society is the overworked groundskeeper. We have a few thousand dollars in the bank and a dozen active volunteers, several of whom would violate child-labor laws if we paid them for their shoveling and wheelbarrow services.

Our resources are taxed every year by extreme weather, invasive rodents, vandals, and our limited meeting schedule. It’s two steps forward, one step back, with a tipsy line-dance stagger to the left. Not only do we embody democracy in all its strengths and weaknesses, we enact every dysfunctional group dynamic you’ve read about in your daily scroll.

Meetings include lengthy discussions of the infamous Moonshine Jones cabin, a society talisman that slouches alone near the entrance to the canyon. For years, no one was sure if the society could even claim it under our special use permit with the Forest Service — which has never stopped it from dominating the agenda during our four yearly meetings. Cheap schemes for stabilizing it are floated and picked apart. We table it for the next meeting.

Eventually someone makes a motion to install a new metal roof or replace some logs on one of the museums. The Lowe brothers volunteer to bring the machinery and we adjourn.

But first Emily reads an essay, sometimes a tale about a Ute Indian boy who helped the miners find missing valuables (like St. Anthony, without the medal), sometimes a group favorite about the old miner’s limb that came loose and got stuck in the dam when his body was being carried down the mountain.

A couple years ago, the society voted to install signs marking former cabins and businesses. I volunteered to put one in front of our place. Our claim had belonged to one of the town founders, after all. He’s buried in the cemetery under one of those bright new crosses. I suggested putting his name and “mining claim” on our sign, or just the name of the mine.

The society was enthusiastic. Everyone hoped it might cause the Fourteener fanatics to slow down before they reach town instead of barreling toward the T intersection at 45 mph.

Several months later, the signs arrived. Emily’s husband dropped ours off on our porch, where Michael found it.

“Why does it say, ‘Smelter’?” he asked.

I grabbed it and almost dropped it on my foot. The sign was powder-coated in official-looking Forest Service Brown and weighed a little more than the 4Runner. It didn’t mention the town founder, the mine, or the claim.

What the what? I asked Emily at the next meeting.

Well, there was a smelter there, she said.

She pointed me to a hand-drawn map of the canyon, circa 1910. Tiny dots and numbers were scattered along a spidery web of roads. Some of the words were straight-up runes, several appeared to say “unknown.” Other designations were obviously inaccurate.

A note under the legend caught my eye: It was made by a man born in 1902, who recalled playing in town as a child.

Even if the map were correct, I said, it also showed a sawmill on our place. If she was going to make extrajudicial rulings, why not something more Pa Ingalls and less Industrial Revolution?

Emily implied it was an honor, because not every small mining town had its own smelter. I implied we might as well put up a digital billboard that flashed, “Vintage Superfund Site” in large red letters.

The sign remained face-down on our porch.

Michael and I were not the only dissidents. Our Austin neighbors received a marker that said, “office.” Tourists started knocking on their door at all hours. They replaced it with a handmade wooden one of their own. (Sadly, it doesn’t say “brothel,” so we can’t draw any conclusions about the relative appeal of mining-town attractions.)

Another small faction remained irked about the cemetery crosses. Weren’t they presumptuous in a town that had once supported three saloons and a bordello but no church?** They’re also somewhat Pet Sematary in the forest’s gothic natural lighting, but to me that’s a plus.

In the meantime, a conflict over photographs was simmering underneath it all …

Next: How to lose the battle … and the war.

*Names have been changed because I’m relating this from memory and taking some liberty with the timeline. Please read with a grain of salt.

** Descriptions on Wikipedia and other sites list a church, but earlier accounts say that while one was built, services were never held there.

BOOK NEWS

We have a new publication date for Up to Her Neck! January 19, 2027. Preorders are open at bookshop.org, barnesandnoble.com, etcetera (it’ll also be available on Amazon, but isn’t yet)! I love getting books in the mail that I ordered months earlier - it’s like Christmas.

My lovely publisher, Empress Editions, made a fab post on Instagram for Women’s History Month, comparing my sleuth to Nancy Drew. (They have a stellar slate of books this season by and about women - check it out!)

Naturally, I’m a Nancy Drew fan from way back (tho not as way back as the first edition of The Haunted Bridge in this video …)

Okay, that’s it for now! See you next week.

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In the meantime, here’s another resourceful Western woman I would’ve loved to share a drink with at the saloon. Read on to the end for a short list of recent Substack posts I enjoyed, and please click that heart and share.

Cock-Eyed Liz arrived in Buena Vista in 1886, when the town was a popular stagecoach stop between the boomtowns and farms of the central Colorado mountains. It didn’t take long for her to make headlines. She’d been a child bride at 13, forced into prostitution by her violent older husband.

Somewhere in the mountains, the SOB died or she just shook him loose like an old mule shoe. Soon after, she had a new last name and a “low brothel.” Lawsuits and more public denunciations followed, but her business rolled along, consumer demand outrunning the censors like it always does.

And I don’t think the importance of this can be overstated: She owned the real estate.

Naturally, there was competition. According to one version of herstory, a rival madam was responsible for the brawl that injured Elizabeth Spurgeon (aka Spurgen) and inspired her (awkward? punny? prophetic?) nickname. Author Ron Franscell, who included Lizzie in the Crime Buff’s Guide to the Outlaw Rockies, believes it was a childhood injury.

Liz seldom gave the census-takers the same story. She was born “at sea”, or in Michigan, maybe Louisiana. But she was at her mother’s side in Kansas in 1905 when that woman passed away. Maybe mom was proud of Liz, making hard lemonade out of an abundance of lemons.

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Liz was a natural marketer, advertising her “girlies” with the help of a trained magpie and direct customer outreach. She’s credited with the observation, “A parlor house is where the girls go to look for a husband and the husbands go to look for a girl.”

In her case, at least, it worked. At age 40 she married Louis Alphonse “Foozy” Enderlin, a French miner and plumber with a talent for homemade wine. They expanded the original building, a one-story frontier brick box with elegant wood trim, and she retired from the life. It was good timing, once again. By 1900, the town’s population would drop by more than half, to just over 1,000 residents.

Liz and Foozy lived in the same building where she’d run her business, but some writers have speculated that Liz was ashamed of her past. A popular version of her tale saddles her with soul-crushing regret.

“Oh, all the little lives I’ve destroyed,” she allegedly told her housekeeper. “That’s what I’ll have to pay for – all those little young lives.”

Share Gallivanting

That plays a little too well to a judgmental and sentimental audience for my taste, like bottom-shelf imitation Tennessee Williams. The court shall regard it as hearsay. Or envy, that great thief of joy. Two stories just this week reflect the timelessness of Liz’s predicament, that we pity sex workers sometimes, but we always judge them, consigning them to society’s dangerous fringe.

In Brazil, a samba school is celebrating sex workers during Carnival to fight persistent stigma (sex work is legal there, but because of a lack of clarity in the laws police are still able to target prostitutes). And in Nevada, where prostitution is legal in ten counties, workers at Sheri’s Ranch are unionizing over intellectual property rights, the dress code, and wages.

So I hope it is true, as Findagrave.com reports, that Liz and Foozy owned a cabin at picturesque Cottonwood Lake that they shared with friends. She made the paper for that, too, in 1921. Liz is buried with Foozy in a plot in Buena Vista, marked with a handsome headstone and fenced with plumbers’ pipe, and I am only ashamed that I haven’t visited it yet.

For many years Liz’s former business had the fortuitous Colorado address of 420 E. Main. When the property was purchased and redeveloped in 2023, the builders preserved the original structure, and it’s once again home to some of the town’s most popular businesses.

The Buena Viking is a former food truck whose success is due in part to generous cocktails and an excellent attitude (motto: Be yourself. Unless you can be a Viking, then always be a Viking). I love the decadent Boone burger, named for the owners’ old dog (RIP) — a beef patty topped with grilled jalapeños and a slab of cream cheese.

Across the courtyard is CKS River Supply, a longtime outfitter and lifestyle store purchased by former river guides in 2016. Upstairs, the beautiful Shorehouse Hotel rents out four suites – incidentally, the number of working women the House of Joy could accommodate.

Liz’s ghost is still knocking around town. Every year the Madams of Central Colorado tell her and her rivals’ story at the Buena Vista Heritage Museum, just down the street. The play was written in the women’s own words by local Kathi Perry, who portrays Liz.

Perhaps in a nod to Cock-eyed Liz’s innate showmanship, the Madams credit the brawl for her infamous nickname. If you visit BV during Gold Rush Days, you can catch a performance.

Next: The accidental HOA at 10,000 feet …

In the meantime, check out Ron Franscell’s award-winning mystery Deaf Row, set in a fictional mountain town outside Denver, featuring a burned-out, aging homicide detective and a terrifying cold case. It’s a little like Craig Johnson wrote the Thursday Murder Club.

THIS MONTH ON SUBSTACK

Even the Losers Get Lucky Sometimes

The Naughty Aughts, as we called them at one point, were brutal. Online harassment really came into its own, and the chest-beating and haranguing of bro culture infected everything. I had an early brush with cancel culture – organized by a couple of Millennials on my newspaper staff, who tried to do it anonymously (lolol). Fortunately, the method and tools weren’t perfected yet, and my bosses didn’t cave. But I did waste precious days of my life worrying I’d lose work I needed and wanted, and wondering what I’d done to deserve the treatment. It was a rough year in what I thought would be my dream job, and I felt a little ill when I first saw the title of this post. The essay is funny and sharp, and clarified that time period for me. Hurt people hurt people, as they say, even if there’s nothing really wrong with them except life not meeting their unreasonable expectations for easy success. I can’t say I love the 2000s, not really, but I understand them better now.

You Should Read Colleen Hoover

This examination of Colleen Hoover’s haters is meaty and delicious. E.g.: “But, as damning an indictment of Hoover’s writing as her own prose might be, clunky sentences abound in award-winning books as well. (Looking at you, Ocean Vuong, Rita Bullwinkel, and Colson Whitehead!)”

Hoover’s writing does make me want to throw the book across the room sometimes (the ridiculous wrap-up in Verity, for instance. JHC!). But I do appreciate her very human portrayal of relationships, her refusal to make them neat parables with “correct” endings.

I think the authors nail it when they call out the classism behind some of the disdain for Hoover. I was a single mom (twice!), and while having those kids was the best thing that could have happened to my young self, I also felt shame at times, or shame pushed at me (these were the Gingrich Contract on America years) for choosing or falling into a “bad” lifestyle. I’m sure to my dismayed parents it was “white trash”. And so I think maybe some of my resistance to Hoover has been very personal - maybe more like an aversion!

The Good Girls’ Guide to Getting Sex-Trafficked

Back to Cock-Eyed Liz and a tale as old as time. This post broke my heart. It’s a potential pitfall for many ambitious young women, but especially women who crave a creative life, a nontraditional life, and don’t have family or independent means to support it.

It’s been a minute, friends. The holidays and work caught up to me, and I have not even cracked the box of elevated blood pressure that is Tax Time for the Self-employed. We drove to LA to celebrate Michael’s 60th birthday with family, and on the way back we stopped in Palm Springs to see a dear friend. Palm Springs is known for its vintage shops, and I did buy a parliament of 70s macrame owls for the Scottsdale bedroom, and an 80s Roberto Cavalli sweater with a large leather tiger and fringe for running to the grocery store, or protesting federal overreach and brutality.

This week and next, I’m sharing some of the local legends that inspired my contemporary midlife thriller, Up to Her Neck (coming so soon - August! And on pre-sale much sooner than that!), then we’ll get back to cabin life. Despite many more rewrites than warranted, this post still came out sounding a little like a news-magazine column, like my old professional-distance reporter self — old habits die harder than a Toyota Tercel. It contains some great photos, though. If it gives your email fits, try opening in the browser or Substack app. As always, thank you for reading!

Charlotte Hot Springs in Buena Vista, Colorado, has been one of my favorite soaks since it opened a few years ago. It’s just three round pools in a simple setting, no massage rooms or cold plunges, unless the snow is deep. The changing rooms are clean, the front desk is professional, and the place is quirky enough that you know it’s run by real locals.

Next to the snack fridge, before you get to the Shein swimming suits and the cut-your-own herb garden, a pair of Macaws rustle their plumage and eye the patrons from a large open cage. Mary Ann has deep blue and bright yellow feathers with a green cap. Ginger, of course, is a voluptuous redhead. I’ve never heard them speak, but a sign next to the register claims they say, “Crap rabbit,” “That’s screwed up,” and most appropriately, “Chillin’.” Crap rabbit!

The pools are outdoors, next to the greenhouses where the Merrifield family raises plants for their garden hut in town. Just up the road, the Merrifields rent out two beautifully redone homestead cabins with private soaking. All of it is fed by the extensive hydrothermal system that runs under the Upper Arkansas River Valley — a system so large and complex, even the wonks at the Colorado School of Mines don’t fully understand it.

According to local legend, one of the Merrifield forebears was digging for silver when he ran into a vein of hot water. As folks say in the mountains, you’ve gotta be resourceful, so he pivoted and started offering twenty-five-cent baths to his fellow miners.

It’s a good story. I’ve repeated it myself many times.

Charlotte’s name can also be found on Memories of St. Elmo, a small book for sale at the hot springs filled with vignettes from her childhood in a mining boomtown southwest of Buena Vista. It was a life of hard work and deprivation. No electricity or cars. Dinner might be tripe in sour-cream gravy or creamed salt cod with potatoes. Or much less. Mining was a risky proposition, and even when payday was good, her father had trouble resisting the saloon and the company of his fellow gamblers.

“Mother used to say one month we live on chicken,” Charlotte wrote, “and next month on feathers.”

Young Charlotte’s chores included gathering firewood and coal, scrubbing the outhouse floors with lye, and washing clothes. “Seems we were always carrying water,” she said.

But her free time sounds like heaven. “In the summer you could find us leading and riding our stubborn little burros.” Charlotte’s was named Flop Eared Dick. “We had wonderful sports all winter, skiing, tobogganing, ice skating, sleighing, and sledding. In summer we fished, hiked, picked wild strawberries, raspberries, huckleberries and dreamed.”

And dreamed!

Charlotte met Roy Merrifield, the son of another miner, when she went to work in his restaurant in town. The couple opened and sold several businesses in Buena Vista over the years, including the Green Parrot Cafe on Main Street, named after a pet Macaw. At other times, Charlotte ran a salon, managed a hotel, and worked in retail.

“Grandma, she was a tough cookie,” Glen Merrifield told me. And this resourceful woman played a key role in the hot spring’s story.

Roy Merrifield wasn’t looking for silver when he hit the aquifer; he was mining for the source of the hot water that seeped into Cottonwood Creek with Judson Holloway, whose father had patented a large claim west of town decades earlier. They dug three tunnels before they were done, the main one 400 feet long. Charlotte left notes (in immaculate cursive) describing the harsh and dangerous conditions:

“One [tunnel] to left was dug for a by pass for water so the men could work in large tunnel, as it kept caving and the heat was to[o] severe for the men to work over 15 min. at a time.”

The region’s last silver boom had petered out in the late teens, followed by the Great Depression a decade later. The Cottonwood Hot Springs hotel, just to the east, never reopened after a fire in 1911. The original Mount Princeton resort, ten miles south, was in foreclosure. But both had drawn celebrities and politicians in their early years, along with pages of irrationally exuberant newspaper coverage.

Holloway started a venture to pipe the hot water into Buena Vista and “erect commodious bath houses and swimming pools.” The business pitch promised an annual income of $40,000, almost $1 million in today’s dollars. “[T]here is no doubt but what there will be 100,000 people annually enjoy the benefits and pleasures of the hot baths.” To give you some context, the current population for the entire county is just over 21,000.

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Thirty miles south, the Depression-era WPA built pipes and pools to bring thermal water from Poncha Springs to nearby Salida — which still operates the public aquatic center — but the Buena Vista project never came to fruition. Glen thinks World War II might have cut the development short.

Several years later, Holloway deeded the property to Roy. Charlotte took the paperwork by horse and buggy to the county clerk in Salida for recording.

“Grandpa wasn’t going to do it,” Glen said. He didn’t want to piss off the Holloways.

Buena Vista historian Suzy Kelly, who co-authored Memories of St. Elmo, thinks it’s more likely Charlotte drove a Model A. Either way, it’s a good story — it’s not like she fired up the heated seats in the Lexus.

“She was so accomplished,” Suzy said. “She was a hairdresser and she could work at a bar.” Charlotte’s mother had set the example, tearing up the saloon in St. Elmo when she’d had it with her husband’s carousing, working as a cook at the original Mount Princeton, and hauling a large stove to Buena Vista to start a bakery that produced hundreds of loaves each day.

Decades passed, deeds and decrees were filed, and the original claim was divided among Merrifields and Holloways — a silent paper trail that hints at high-level horse-trading if not outright Hatfield-McCoy tension. The title has been quieted, in any event, and that’s how we’ll leave the ghosts, too.

The state filled in the tunnels when they realigned and paved Highway 306 (in case you were getting the notion to go poking around in the hills) but the Merrifield family reestablished their water rights in the late Sixties. The homestead cabins, one named Merrifield, the other Holloway, are fed now by pipes that run under the road and across the creek. The greenhouse and the new pools rely on wells.

Twenty years ago, Glen started to develop a resort on his family’s parcel that would have rivaled the modern Mount Princeton. The 2008 crash put an end to that. He’d already built the sewer line and the main building’s footing, but, “the banks didn’t see value in the idea.”

Glen no longer plans to add a hotel. “The labor market is sucked dry,” he says, echoing a common problem in the Valley.

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Charlotte’s pools are decorated with turtle, stingray, and seahorse tiles, and buffered from the mountain winds by the flank of Mount Princeton and the greenhouses. The enclosed garden contains lounging areas and a “beach” with toys for kids, who bring noodles into the coolest pool. The casual, cozy setting encourages conversation — you’ll likely end up chatting with a local or two, which makes it a great spot to pick up the latest news, or a legend of variable quality.

It’s not a bad replacement for the Green Parrot, which remained a beloved dive bar until it was replaced a few years ago by a shop that sells $28 tapers.* Ginger and Mary Ann oversee their inheritance from their perch near the check-in desk. When I sink into one of the pools, surrounded by mountains and a bluebird sky, I think of the joy Charlotte felt, not despite the hard work but alongside it.

“Living then was happiness,” Charlotte wrote, “and such peace and calm. My life has been enriched by these pleasant memories.”

You can buy Memories of St. Elmo here. Reserve one of the Merrifield Homestead Cabins here.

* It’s a lovely shop. I buy a lot of my Christmas decorations there.

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Up next: The 411 on 420 S. Main, from brothel to burgers, featuring another tough Colorado cookie.

The day we closed on our cabin in the mountains, I achieved a goal so secret I’d hardly admitted it to myself: I now owned four buildings stuffed to the sagging rafters with Very Old Things. Things I could paw through at my leisure without an impatient spouse circling the estate sale, sighing and shuffling, as I tested the functionality of a spinning wheel or examined a Japanese tea set for chips.

I love touching the stuff. The more humble and quotidian the tool, the closer I feel to the people who journeyed thousands of miles by ship, train, carriage, and foot to make a new life in this unforgiving environment. They survived silver busts, bank runs, frontier justice, landslides, and — judging by a pair of warped door-size panels down by the creek — at least one explosion. Surely I can manage a frozen water pump and a couple of dead batteries?

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Because the property is an old mining claim, we’ve found spikes the size of cricket bats and clamps too heavy to lift with one hand. A set of rails that once carried ore carts twist along the ground like a pair of giant russet ribbons. Fittingly, the Claim came with a marker, an enormous gear abandoned by the road between the two driveway entrances. It’s perfect where it is, lucky for us, because the crew that transported the Statue of Liberty is not available to relocate it.

Pioneer thriftiness ruled the joint, from the Pyrex skylight in the outhouse to the leaf spring that serves as a foundation for one of the sheds. Almost anything was worth saving because it could be repurposed someday. But eleven miles of hard road also discourages dump runs, so we have plenty of … antiques … to choose from as we redo the cabins. Here are a few favorites, with before and after photos:

I smoked us out the first time I lit the kitchen stove because I mistook the diverter that sends hot air around the oven before it exits the chimney for the flue damper. I now have a handbook thanks to our lovely neighbors, Christine and Malia, and am beginning to get the hang of this brilliant appliance. This summer I’ll deep-clean and season it and attempt cornbread and muffins.

Antique wood-burning stoves aren’t uncommon in Colorado. Most of our neighbors in the nearby mining “ghost towns” have them, no two the same. I’ve coveted side sinks that heat water, overhead bread cabinets and butter warmers, enamel finishes and intricate scrollwork pulls. The lower cabin will need one soon, so I am on the hunt …

The windows in the main cabin were covered in curtains when we first toured it. In the boarded-up gloom of late fall, they looked like throwaways, but the panels in the bedroom turned out to be a real find. The texture is like raw silk, with green, brown, pink, blue, and yellow flora on a cream background. The edges are a little frayed and the lining sags, but they were spared the rodent depredation suffered by the upholstery and quilts.

We were disappointed when our plumber said the vintage Servel propane refrigerator was too dangerous to operate, but then Michael realized it would make a great pantry. It’s got style for miles and the mice have not found a way in. We use the old ice tray as our kitchen soap dish.

The Claim’s second owner, the intrepid Walter, assembled a haphazard Servel museum over the years. Every shed contained at least one. Unfortunately, they looked like props for the Saw franchise by the time we came along.

I haven’t identified the decorative clasps in the two images above. One local historian suggested they may have held fabric in place inside a carriage. The old leaf spring supporting the big shed could have come from a carriage, so maybe!

If you have additional information or insight on any of these items, please comment or send me a message. There is so much more, of course. I haven’t even talked about the bathroom, which contains one of the coolest vanity mirrors you’ll ever see (one day soon). But for today, we’ll finish with a few more stoves.

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Next: A little cabin break for a virtual tour of a local hot springs with a unique history.

Previous: Sh*t gets real

I was walking with Michael in the West Village on a gorgeous fall day when my phone rang. I bumped it to voicemail. It rang again. The name “Sue B.” floated over a photo of a one-story brown cabin encircled by pines and aspen.

“Uh-oh,” I said, “it’s our realtor.”

A septic inspection was scheduled that morning at the property we had under contract in the Rocky Mountains. We were close to the end of our option period, and we were optimistic. The building inspector had turned in his report a few days earlier.

“Even with the issues that I have outlined,” he wrote, “I think these places have some great potential with some upgrades and a little care.” He described the roof of the main cabin as “sound.” Sound! Like our decision to buy the place!

But we would need a separate inspection for the septic system that was connected to the sole indoor toilet. This step was crucial for Michael, whom I’d coaxed and argued into my wild scheme. Yes, the property was off-grid, but it wasn’t primitive. We would have lights, running water, internet. And modern waste disposal.

He’d finally agreed, with the requirement that the outhouses were strictly décor – even the green and pink number with an “Office” sign hanging on it, which I’d named the Watermelon.

I pulled Michael into a doorway before answering the call. Sue was a five-foot, honey-blonde Granite State transplant who’d traveled the world before settling in the mountains of Colorado. She never raised her voice above “meditation retreat leader.” That day, she was breathless.

The septic inspector had called her the moment he got cell service.

“He couldn’t find the tank,” she said, “but he found a mine shaft by the cabin.”

“What do you mean, by the cabin?”

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We knew the property was an old mining claim. The survey used to register it in 1900 showed three cuts and two adits, but they were acres away from the buildings. Up the mountain. On the other side of the road. Overgrown tailing piles, deep gold and scattered with glittering pieces of quartz, were the only evidence left of the old excavations.

Sue was still talking, using phrases like, “adjacent to” and “couldn’t see the bottom.”

Less than seventy-two hours later, we were back in Colorado. Ice floated in the creek. The late-fall sun cast long shadows on the frozen ground. We paced around the foundation in widening circles, clearing snow, checking under stones and machinery. Nada.

Then I realized what we weren’t seeing: tire or boot tracks. Maybe the inspector went to the wrong cabin?! The claim didn’t have an address; directions consisted of, “turn left, drive eleven miles. If you get to the ghost town you’ve gone too far.” It was possible.

I called the county. The permit tech couldn’t find a record for a septic system. Given the age of the place, she said, that wasn’t a surprise. We pressed the owner again through his agent. He repeated that the toilet had worked fine since he’d bought the place … almost twenty years earlier.

We walked the creek bank, but there was no sign of a pipe. Phew.

“Between us,” I wrote in a jaunty email to Sue, “not a deal-killer but we do want to know what we’re getting into.”

We sent another inspector, who couldn’t find the tank either. He also didn’t encounter a bottomless mine shaft just out the back door. Score one for us. But every adventure is a journey of discovery, and one of the things I discovered is that I’m not a person who can flush a toilet in the woods and not worry about where that shit is going.

I had been in a state of mild dread since Sue’s phone call. In exchange for giving us six months to close, we’d offered the seller a large earnest-money deposit. In a couple of days it would go hard. My email bravado was empty: The outhouses were a deal-killer. They’re made of the kind of thick, knotty planks you can no longer find, furnished with handmade tp holders, chock-full of pioneer ingenuity. The red one has a skylight made from a vintage Pyrex dish.

But I couldn’t blame Michael if he felt his forebears didn’t suffer the indignities of the bedpan and the sadism of early dentistry just so he could return to the rustic joys of the pit toilet.

Could I?

We put off the conversation, talking around it in vague what-ifs and euphemisms. I was afraid he’d say no. I knew he was afraid of my disappointment. I’d been running a house-renovation and finance business he’d started without consulting me and I was angry and resentful, almost fifty, adrift. I felt like I’d never wanted anything as much as I wanted the Claim. I also knew this idea was a little reckless. And more than a little selfish.

If Michael had blinked, I don’t know what would have happened. But the place had gotten under his skin, too. We had to redo the cabin anyway, he said. We’d figure out the mysterious septic system then.

It’s true that all failure is at some level a failure of imagination. For instance, I did not imagine a mine shaft that was also a septic tank. Our inspection period passed and we were still in contract. Late at night, when I couldn’t sleep, I researched composting toilets.

Next: All the cool things that come with a 19^th-century mining claim.

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Part I: Little wreck in the big woods

Part II: Hand-me-down dreams

Michael and I had driven straight through from San Antonio the day before in our 4-Runner, with our dachshund Wally, two friends, and their Jack Russell, Rufus, in the backseat. It took fourteen hours, an interminable number of them spent in the barren Ports to Plains corridor between Texas and New Mexico, where Capulin’s extinct cone relieves the wind-blown tedium for all of thirty minutes. The floor was littered with burrito wrappers and Rufus’s little white hairs.

Our realtor had called two days earlier to say that the cabin owner wanted to meet us. He’d countered our first offer, which was ridiculously low, dictated by what we might be able to scrape together and wild hope. Then our negotiations had stalled out. But the owner was willing to drive in from Utah if we would come to the property. It was an opening, no question.

I’d noticed the cabin the year before, sitting back from a Forest Service road in a clearing of lodgepole pines and aspen. It was maybe six-hundred square feet, with two small wings off its center, its many windows covered in peeling brown boards. I spent the winter hunched over topo maps and the county assessor’s website, armpits damp, heart racing. The cabin sat at the lower end of a long, narrow lot that ran up the mountain at an angle. Make that cabins; there were definitely two. And was that the creek, cutting a meandering path through the southeast corner?

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We’d returned late the following summer and planned our hikes as close as possible to the cabin, circling it like wolves on the hunt, feinting for an opening, a weakness. The same fading for-sale sign sagged near the drive. The plastic pocket meant to hold informational flyers was filled with dust. It still felt impossible, and yet there the little cabin sat, empty and unused. Waiting. The day we loaded the car to return home, we stopped by the real-estate office in town.

That was in August. Now, three months and countless emails and phone calls later, we were face to face with older Bill Murray, the man who held my dream in his hands. His name was Mark, and his family was descended from one of the old miners. He was divorced, had kids, owned bars in Utah. It was too much time and work now, and his family owned another cabin down the road, in one of the area’s many ghost towns. He wanted to sell this property and buy his brother out of the other one.

“All right,” he said. Small talk was over. “Do you want to see the inside?”

Okay, close your eyes and imagine a cozy room, with rustic log walls and a fire burning in the grate.

Now, purge that image from your mind.

The mining claim on which we stood had been registered in the early 1900s, but the musty cabins we toured that day were built in the early Fifties. I doubt the carpet had been changed since. So many mice droppings were embedded in the textured swirl nap, I thought it was two-tone.

The walls were perhaps two inches thick and appeared to be supported, if that’s the right word, by horizontal two-by-fours. Extension cords ran through holes drilled in the two-bys. Ancient propane lamps were mounted on wooden beams overhead. The well was shut off, the pipes drained for the winter, so we couldn’t test the toilet, but Mark assured us it was connected to a septic system.

“It’s always worked fine,” he said. “We’ve never checked it.”

A yellow generator as big as a baby buffalo blocked the path to the wood-burning kitchen stove.

“I’ll leave that for you,” Mark said.

Friends, when someone offers you a free generator, ask why.

But I wasn’t asking questions that day, not the important ones. Silk barkcloth curtains hung in the bedroom windows, the pink and green pinecone pattern suggesting a woman’s eye. Several windowpanes were patched with duct tape, but the firewood box was well-made and tidy, and the vintage Servel refrigerator looked new on the inside. Did I mention the wood-burning kitchen stove?

The upper outhouse had been painted green on the outside, pink on the inside, like a giant watermelon. Mirrors were installed in both. More feminine touches. The daughter, maybe. Or the ex-wife.

Mark waited with Sue while we walked down to the creek.

“It’s incredible,” we breathed to each other in the crisp air. “It’s perfect, right?” We’d hiked to the top of the property on the other side of the road earlier that morning. You could walk right onto the Continental Divide trail, or glimpse Mount Huron across the canyon.

By the time we returned to the cabin, we had folded. We agreed to Mark’s last counter, and he gave us six months to close (read: figure out how to pay for it). The road would be snowed-in soon. No one else was coming to see it before the spring anyway.

He smiled, which was the first time I noticed the sadness hanging on him like a thin cardigan. But I was too stunned by our mad leap, our daring, to grasp this, that the beginning of our dream might be the end of someone else’s. There would be time for that later.

“I hope you guys enjoy it,” he said. “It’s a really special place.”

Next: “The septic inspector called. He said he found a mine shaft?”

Previous: Little wreck in the big woods

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“Crisis” carried an unmistakable whiff of envy, coming as it did with implicit permission to step back and ask, What the hell was all that about? And do I have to keep doing it?

In my small midwestern town, women just got older through some unmentionable process that began with cat-eye glasses and shape-wear and ended in slippers and house dresses. You could make an extended stop at bedazzled sweatshirts, but ultimately you were expected to embrace this fate with oven mitts and selfless good cheer.

So, I just resolved not to do it. Mousse, gel, and tight jeans forever. Yes to the cleavage, no to the menopause. Especially the part that was finally being discussed, but only as a sexless purgatory — the weight gain, the mood swings, the brain fog. Certainly not as cool as a midlife crisis.

But Mother Nature will catch you, one way or the other. What, I ask you, is buying a rundown cabin at 10,000 feet if not a hot flash?

That was in 2018. Here’s what it looks like now:

So cozy. So cute. #cabinporn for days.

Like well-behaved Bernedoodles and European pieds-à-terre, my little mountain dream appears on Instagram from time to time, spreading falsehoods and inspiring mischief. In case you, too, are taken hostage by a midlife crisis hot flash*, I think it’s only fair to reveal the rocky path that led to this curated image of bliss.

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It was love at first sight, of course.

I discovered our cabin in 2016 at the end of a long morning of hiking. And by hiking, I mean creeping along a pockmarked “road,” scanning every gap in the trees for a trail that apparently existed only on the map. The 4-Runner was crammed full of adults and kids whose spirits were too crushed to protest when I pulled over at yet another spot that was definitely not the trailhead.

A “for sale” sign was posted next to the chained driveway. A green roof sagged behind overgrown aspen, and the scruffy outhouses (two!) pretty much guaranteed no indoor plumbing. But I could hear the rush and tumble of a creek. The surrounding peaks glowed in the midday sun. The perfect second act materialized in front of me. Kids camping in the yard, friends barbecuing on the deck (as soon as the railing was reattached). This was it, this was my dream. I snapped a pic of the realtor’s number and climbed back in the car.

Just as we were about to give up on our hike and head back to town, my brother spied a trail. Not the one we had set out to find, but a little slice of heaven nonetheless. It felt like fate.

But there was no way. A few years before I’d blown up my media career to pursue another dream, starting an independent news site. My husband Michael had done the same, trading in a reliable insurance partnership for risky restaurants, right before the 2008 crash. We had no retirement account, and three of our four kids were still in school. Maybe this was my real dream, finally, but it would have to go on the shelf. Maybe forever.

I thought about that cabin often as I broiled through another endless Texas summer. I would open my phone and stare at the photos — prophetically, they were mostly of the outhouses. I knew the cabin would be gone before we returned.

Next week: Cutting the impossible deal

*If you are thinking of buying a cabin in Colorado, DM me and we can talk about the best places, etc.

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